067 How to Plant a Fruit Tree. Best Blueberry Varieties. Frost Protection Tips.

If you live in the West or the South, Perhaps Santa left you some new bare root fruit trees. Back East or up North, maybe it will be the Easter Bunny making those deliveries.
Wherever you live, we have tips for planting bare root fruit trees, those six foot tall bare sticks with pretty pictures attached, arriving this winter at nurseries and garden centers (just in case Santa and the Easter Bunny don’t come through for you).
Also, which blueberry plants are right for you?
Phil Pursel of wholesale grower Dave Wilson Nursery has some ideas about that. 
And, for those of you nursing tender plants through frosty nights, what are the best ways to protect sensitive plants such as citrus trees and succulents? Our favorite retired college horticulture professor, Debbie Flower, talks about the good ways, and the not-so-good ways of offering your plants a few degrees of protection on freezing nights.

It’s all on Episode 67 of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you by Smart Pots. And we will do it all in under 30 minutes.

Dave Wilson Nursery Fruit Tube Video: Good Soil Mix for Blueberries
Dave Wilson Nursery Fruit Harvest Chart
Frost Protection Tips at the Farmer Fred Rant Blog page
Frost Protection Tips for Citrus and Other Subtropicals (University of California)
Frost Cloths for cold weather plant protection
Warm Christmas-style lights for citrus tree frost protection

More episodes and info available at Garden Basics with Farmer Fred

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Farmer Fred

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Transcript

Farmer Fred  0:00 
Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. it's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.

Farmer Fred   0:20 
Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information well you've come to the right spot.

Farmer Fred  0:32  
If you live in the west or the south, maybe Santa's left you some new bareroot fruit trees, or if you're back east or up north, it just might be the Easter Bunny making those deliveries. Wherever you live, we have tips for planting bare root fruit trees. You know, those six foot tall bare sticks with pretty pictures attached that will be arriving this winter at nurseries and garden centers. Just in case Santa or the Easter Bunny don't come through for you. Also, which blueberry plants are right for you? Phil Pursel of wholesale grower Dave Wilson nursery has some ideas about that. And for those of you nursing tender plants through frosty nights, what are the best ways to protect sensitive plants such as citrus trees and succulents? Our favorite retired college horticulture Professor Debbie Flower talks about the good ways and the not so good ways of offering your plants a few degrees of protection on these freezing nights. It's all on episode 67 of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you buy Smart Pots, and we do it all in under 30 minutes. Let's go.

Farmer Fred  1:39  
It may be winter, but Santa is coming early to nurseries in California and soon will be arriving at nurseries throughout the United States as the weather warms up back East and in the Midwest. You're going to see more and more fruit trees, berries, nuts, vines, plenty of edible crops for you to be planting in your garden. And as I said, California gardeners have sort of a head start on it right now as Dave Wilson Nursery is delivering vines and berries and a few fruit and nut varieties to California nurseries. What's in? What's good? Let's find out. We're talking with Phil Pursel from Dave Wilson Nursery. Phil, I was at the nursery the other day and I noticed a lot of Dave Wilson product had just arrived. There were blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. I think I saw kiwi, there were all kinds. There were pomegranates. There's a lot coming in.

Phil Pursel  2:38  
Yeah, so what we do is we have two basic programs, we have a small fruit program that we put into four by nine inch columns, liner sleeves. And then we have our traditional bare root program, which is our standard fruit trees. So we ship the farmer's market program early so that it kind of gets the nurseries in the mood, then you know, get the edibles out to the consumer. At the same time. They  tend to make nice little early Christmas gifts for people to pick up. And that kind of is the intro to you know, our big bare fruit season where we send all of our fruit trees for the year.

Farmer Fred  3:20 
There has been a big change in the way that the product is being delivered. Now, when you said bare root, old timers might think, 'oh yeah, the trees are plunged into a bed of sawdust in the back of the nursery'. Well, not so much anymore. It seems like most berry plants and others are coming already in containers.

Phil Pursel  3:42  
Yeah, you know, we've done market studies and the demographic has just changed where the younger consumer is more comfortable with trees and berries and set in pots. These feel a little bit more safer to them. We still grow our fruit trees as a basic bare root. And to give you a little background is that we field-grow our trees. We have just finished harvesting our trees with a digger that excavates these trees. We planted trees about four or five inches on center. And when these trees come out of the ground, it's just a dormant top, in bare root. We grade everything out and then we bundle them then we ship them to our retailers, the retailers now instead of just popping that tree into the sawdust bin, and some of them still do that, and sell them. But a lot of them have gotten into just going ahead and potting them up. A very popular way of doing it is putting them into a pulp pot which is biodegradable. It's it's just a way to get the plants out for the newer gardener who is not quite comfortable with just seen a tree, a stick and bare root and not knowing what to do with that.

Farmer Fred  4:56 
What do they do with the pulp pot when they get at home.

Phil Pursel  4:58 
So what they do Is the nice thing about the pulp pot, as opposed to a bare root tree,. If you get a bare route tree, you need to plant it that day. With a pulp pot, it allows you to go ahead and prepare the soil. And you can plant it right now or you can plant it in the spring, but you plant the tree in the pulp pot. It's made out of a paper product, press paper. So you can plant that tree in this pot, like you would a normal plant. And after about six months, the whole pot itself would disintegrate and the roots will keep on growing into the soil. So it just gives you  more options of when to plant that tree.

Farmer Fred  5:39 
Can you help out that pulp pot to break down by perhaps soaking it before planting?

Phil Pursel  5:45  
Yeah, there's different ways of doing it. Actually, if you were to get a tree right now that is in a pulp pot, you can just pop it right out of the the pulp pot and plant it in the ground as a regular bare root. But it's like I said, if you want to hold on to it, different ways of doing it is like you said, soaking the whole pot. We always suggest scoring the sides of the pulp pot in the bottom with a utility knife to kind of help open things up a little bit, to help the process of breaking down.

Farmer Fred  6:16 
And so why is it that  it would be advisable to plant it in the pulp pot if you've been holding on to it for weeks or months? Is there something about the root structure inside?

Phil Pursel  6:27 
Yes. So what happens with the pulp pot is that it acts almost like a plastic container. If you don't have time to plant the tree right away. As the weather starts warming up. Let's say you wait, you know, from the time you get the tree and you can't plant it for a month. If you just get it out of the sawdust, it's already starting to send out feeder roots, that can be damaged if you try planting it as a traditional bare root. By planting it in the pulp pot, your not disturbing the roots. It minimizes the chances of that tree failing.

Farmer Fred  7:15  
The pulp pot acts as insulation. And then and then as the winter rains come or you're irrigating that pulp pot breaks down and the roots go out and you've got yourself a healthy tree. How deep do you plant that tree?

Phil Pursel  7:15 
Generally speaking, when you will buy a plant in a pulp pot, the nursery will have it planted at the level where we took it out of the ground. You'll see where the soil is, when you plant that tree into the ground. You want to make sure that you do not plant the tree and the pulp pot deeper than the soil level that is in that pulp pot. In fact, we always like people to kind of elevate the pulp pot a little bit so that it's you know, half an inch inch above your your normal ground level. So any type of settling you'll pretty much be pulp pot-level soil and your ground level will be about even.

Farmer Fred  7:31 
How do you get water inside that pulp pot then if you just planted it all into the garden is there a lip around that pulp pot that you can cut off to perhaps make it easier for the water to flow into that area?

Phil Pursel  8:22 
Yes. So what I like to do there's different methods is that when you plant the Pulp pot I like leaving the pulp pot lid exposed, you know for the first few months and when you water your water inside the pulp pot just like wiring in a pot but then you also water on the outside of the pulp pot equally. And what that will do is it helps the water transpire from one to the other so you don't get a stuck type of plant by water inside the pulp pot and then water outside of pulp pot and this actually helps speed up the breakdown of that lip. By the summertime that lip is just going to pop right off. it's going to you know it will have disintegrated.

Farmer Fred  9:06  
Now for those nurseries that still have true bare root. They do have their fruit trees, their bare root fruit trees plunged into a bit of sawdust. Now one strategy we used to employ when we got those home would be to immediately plunge it into either a bucket of water, a big bucket of water or if you've got a blank garden space, what's called healing it in. basically just sort of digging a shallow hole and getting the root zone buried in the garden soil temporarily until you decide to move it.

Phil Pursel  9:37  
Yes, the water part is we always suggest when you get ready to plant the true bare root tree is that you want to really soak the roots so you hydrate everything. Let's say you bring it back from the nursery, and you know they'll wrap it in, you know some plastic a little bit of sawdust. If you let it sit there, odds are it's gonna dry out a little bit. The one thing you don't want to do with the true bare root tree is the have the roots dry out. So soaking it, hydrating the roots are, you know, something that's recommended. Now, if you have a true bare root tree,  and  let's say you buy it on a Friday and you really can't get to it till Sunday. Then healing in is a process where you just cover the roots with soil, even if it's you know from soil that you're going to be planting the tree with. Or if you have like a little planting bed that you can just go ahead and dig, you know, dig the tree into but you want to make sure that it has some sort of type of soil covering until you're ready to plant it and then at that point, we still recommend soaking in water before you go ahead and plant in the hole.

Farmer Fred  10:40  
We're talking with Phil Pursell from Dave Wilson nursery. when we come back we're gonna be talking about good blueberry varieties for your yard. You're listening to Garden Basics with Farmer Fred.

Farmer Fred 2  10:55  
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Farmer Fred  12:05  
We're talking with Phil Pursel from Dave Wilson Nursery. If you've been by your favorite local nursery, you may have already seen berry plants popping up at the nursery, they're going to be arriving at other nurseries throughout the United States in the months ahead. But Phil, let's talk about some good varieties of these berry plants that you carry there at Dave Wilson nursery that people will find. One of my favorites is blueberries. Dave Wilson has so many great blueberry varieties, what are the best selling ones?

Phil Pursel  12:36 
it kind of depends on which region you're in. If you're in the colder region of the country, you want a Northern highbush variety. In more of the temperate areas, we always suggest Southern highbush. Southern highbush need less chill hours. Northern highbush need more chill hours. Most of your home garden varieties that are offered are those two.  But when do you want it? If you want an early variety, a mid season variety or late variety and that's kind of how we want people to start thinking about when you plant fruits or blueberries or such. That's kind of what to do. So like O'Neal is a early variety. Emerald really good variety is something that we suggest instead of maybe let's say you really like blueberries, and I tell you you know emeralds are great, but don't get three or four Emerald plants. get an emerald, get a O'Neal get a Reville, , Southmoon, sharpblue, so that now you have an extended amount of blueberries throughout the whole season, as opposed to having all enrolled at one time and nothing, you know, afterwards.

Farmer Fred  13:43 
Well, not only that, but by having several different varieties of blueberries or for that matter blackberries or raspberries as well. By having multiple varieties, you probably get better pollination,

Phil Pursel  13:53 
you do, you know, kind of a little known secret is a lot of our trees are self fruitful. But whenever you have another variety of that same fruit type, the cross pollination really increases fruit yield. So that's that's why it's really good on blueberries to have multiple varieties because you'll double what the plant would normally produce. If you only had that one variety there.

Farmer Fred  14:18 
You mentioned that the difference between northern highbush and southern highbush blueberries is their need for chill hours. A little explanation of what a chill hour is that is any hour between the months of November and February where the temperature is between 32 and 45 degrees. It helps that plant hibernate and get set for a new productive season. Here in the Central Valley. We're lucky to get 800 to 1000 chill hours. In Southern California, where it's warmer, they have a lot fewer but there are blueberry varieties for warmer climates that don't even require 800, aren't there.

Phil Pursel  14:54 
There are. University of Florida i is kind of like the hotbed, Producing low chill variety 100 chill hours is such that a lot of the commercial growers are adapting to you here, even here in California, because chill hours seem to decline every single year. Oregon is a hotspot for higher chill hour blueberries because they kind of service you know, the colder regions. So between Florida and Oregon, you can have, you know, blueberries throughout the United States everywhere.

Farmer Fred  15:29 
Well, that brings up a variety of blueberries we haven't even touched on yet. And that's the rabbiteye blueberries.

Phil Pursel  15:34  
right. Rabbit eyes tend to the nice thing about rabbit eyes is they produce a little bit later but they produce for a longer time as opposed to just this you know, standard highbush, which gives you one big crop all at once.

Farmer Fred  15:47  
And when it comes to blueberries, I think it's universal, be it a rabbiteye, a Southern high bush or a northern high bush. Don't they all like a lower pH soil?

Phil Pursel  15:57 
They do. They do need an acid soil base. The great thing about blueberry and I always tell people if you're new to gardening, don't know what to start with, but you want edible. Start with the blueberry. It's a good entry level plant that you can plant in a pot or in the ground. Plant it in a pot, and It makes a nice decorative, edible ornamental, and it's really easy to make a mix that is specific for blueberry. If you live in an area where you have very alkaline soils, it's a little more difficult to grow blueberry in the ground. And a lot of times I tell people, put them in pot, putting them in whiskey or wine barrels, where you can go ahead and make a mix up of organic ingredients which makes the perfect mix for for blueberries. But blueberry is a great place to start. You're not quite sure about you know having fruit out in the yard. Because you're afraid of it blueberries are it's like the beginners plan to start with.

Farmer Fred  17:00 
Exactly if you're not familiar at all with blueberries we should point out it is a fairly compact plant varieties get usually from three feet to six feet tall. You can prune them to maintain their shape as well and still have plenty of blueberries for you and the family. By growing them in pots, too, It's pretty easy to manipulate the pH of the soil. pH refers to the relative acidity or alkalinity of the soil and blueberries like it on the acid side. Basically a pH between  5.5 and six is ideal for blueberries and the Dave Wilson nursery, you can go online to their website, Dave Wilson dot com, there, Phil, you're going to find a recipe for a soil mix that is perfect for blueberries for putting in containers.

Phil Pursel  17:47 
Yeah, Tom Spellman and I just last month, put together a new what we call our Fruit tube video that shows how to plant blueberries in containers.  it's just a simple mix, you get a bag of organic potting soil, a bag of Sphagnum peat moss, and a bag of medium pathway part. And it's equal parts - one third one third, one third - put it in a wheelbarrow or you know, something to mix it in, mix it all up, put a little bit of organic fertilizer in there. Boom, that's it, you have your mixture, it's very simple.

Farmer Fred  18:23 
Now one word of warning about peat moss, you need to thoroughly soak it in order for it to maintain moisture, otherwise, the water just rolls off. And one trick I found if you buy a bag of peat moss is open up the top of the bag, stick the garden hose in it and let it flow, let the water flow into that bag. Or take that peat moss out, put it in a wheelbarrow or a big bucket and fill it with water and let it sit for a few hours to soak up the water and then mix it in with those two other ingredients.

Phil Pursel  18:54 
Yeah, that's a very good tip. Because a lot of times, you know the big bags of peat moss have been sitting around at your local retailer for a while and even though they're encased in plastic, they can start drying out a little bit. And then what happens is the water just goes away from that. So by soaking it,  that's a really good tip.

Farmer Fred  19:13  
And again, you can find the Fruit Tube videos at Dave Wilson dot com. Phil and Tom have all sorts of great videos there on fruit trees and the berry plants.

Phil Pursel  19:24 
I mean we we have a pretty in depth library on the harvesting of the trees, how to plant a fruit tree, how to prune a fruit tree, the concept of our backyard orchard culture. these videos we want the homeowner to feel comfortable on planning their own orchard or having an edible garden because it really isn't difficult if you follow just a few basic steps. So on these videos, it's all tutorial. And we try to make it as user friendly as possible.

Farmer Fred  19:54  
It's at Dave Wilson nursery.com for those videos and some great information and including there's a wonderful chart there, a harvest chart, and all the various Dave Wilson nursery berries and fruit trees are listed by dates of relative harvest. And even though this calendar applies to California, if you live down south or back east, you can sort of get a good idea of what's early. And what's late. Now, talking about blueberries you mentioned, like the O'Neil is early here in California that would be ripening in mid May. And if you wanted a mid season one, you might go with that Reville or the... wish I put on stronger glasses to read this...

Phil Pursel  20:35 
South moon, and then you finish up with Sunshine blue. And what people really don't realize is that the commercial farmer, he's all about making sure that he has fruit throughout the whole season. And you can do the exact same thing at your house. You don't want all the fruit to Come on at the end of June, and then the rest of summer, you don't have anything producing. So by using this harvest chart, it's a guide so you can kind of look at well do I want a peach in? In July? Do I want a pluot in August, you know, it's a good planning tool.

Farmer Fred  21:11 
Visit Dave Wilson dot com for a whole host of very good, accurate information about growing fruits, vines, and nuts. No matter where you live wherever Dave Wilson product can be found, which is most of the United States, Phil Pursel, we learned a lot today. Thank you so much.

Phil Pursel  21:31 
Thanks for having me on.

Farmer Fred  21:34 
Time for a quick tip here on Garden Basics. Now those of you that live in USDA zone nine probably are very familiar with protecting tender plants from frost, maybe you're using frost cloths, maybe you're being sure to make sure that the soil is moist, to stave off the effects of a frost. Maybe you're stringing Christmas lights in your citrus trees in order to add a few degrees of protection, the big old C seven or C eight or C nine bulbs that actually have some heat to them. That's always a good idea. But then you could go to a nursery and buy a spray to put on those plants that will allegedly protect your plants from freezing. Is that a fact? Well, it just so happens that retired college horticultural Professor Debbie Flower, once upon a time took part in a study to determine if that was so or not. But I think in your study, Debbie, did didn't you do it on conifers?

Debbie Flower  22:32 
Yes, the study was done funded as studies at colleges, I was working at a cooperative extension office and they get funding from many places, and one is industry. And this was a study funded by industry that mailed Christmas decorations to people who ordered them. So it was a Pacific Northwest company and they have lots of conifers up there, Douglas fir and cedars. And you know, some many I'm sure grown specifically for this industry, which would be clipped and packaged up and mailed to your house if you ordered them so that you can decorate your home with the lovely smelling real greens of Christmas. And so we treated the cuttings that had come off the plant we had collected  on our own site, and then mailed them to ourselves to see which treatment worked best. So that when the cuttings, the plant pieces, arrived back to us, they were in the best shape possible. I can't tell you what worked the best I don't remember the specific details of that study. And the answers went to the industry that does it on a regular basis. But I can tell you that I also participated in some other studies with the same sort of material that was sprayed on those conifers. And Holly would be another one, a broadleaf evergreen, that were shipped in the mail. But we did it on plants that were alive and we're in containers, and then we checked their respiration rate and transpiration rate. So we're getting into some big words here. The plant is alive and it has to breathe. It has to absorb air and it has to get rid of the air, the parts of the air doesn't need. And a lot of that exchange of gases occurs in the leaves or needles needles do the job for a conifer. And they're often on the back but sometimes on the top of the leaf as well. And if they're called stoma, or stomata, and if those openings get clogged, then that exchange of air cannot occur. And that's what we saw. So we sprayed the plants that are alive with the commercial frost preventative sprays. Then we measured there again we had already done at once measured their ability to exchange gases with the atmosphere and it went way down. And it also increased. The other thing we noticed that was increased by the sprays on the plant was loss of moisture from the plant. Yeah, in order to understand that you need to understand the concept of osmosis. Osmosis is when water moves from an area of high water concentration to an area of low water concentration, and it goes through a semi permeable membrane. If you make coffee or tea in the morning, you're using osmosis, the water goes into the coffee or tea and then moves out and makes the drink that you get to drink in a plant. It happens from cell to cell and many other places in the plant. But what we noticed was when the chemical that is used to prevent the supposedly prevent the plant from wilting due to frost is on the plant just one layer of it. It sets up an osmotic water exchange where the water inside the plant which is at high concentration moves through what is now a semi permeable membrane, which is the spray that was just applied to the plant out into the environment. So it actually increased the loss of water from the plant and caused wilting to occur sooner. We also did the experiment with multiple layers of the spray that changed the water situation. It still clogged the pores, still stopped the gas exchange, but it did, the loss of water did not occur. And our speculation was that it was because we just coated the whole plant with so much waxy stuff, so much of the chemical, that the water couldn't come out at all.

Farmer Fred  26:21 
What was the reasoning behind the industry to come up with this stuff in the first place? It basically is a coating. It's a polymer coating that allegedly protects plants. It staves off the effects of a frost or freeze, it offers a few degrees of protection. So I would imagine a lot of people are thinking as they're applying it, oh, this will make the plant warmer. It doesn't make the plant warmer, though, does it?

Debbie Flower  26:45 
No, it doesn't make the plant warmer. And it doesn't even, as far as I know, allow the plant to hold on to any warmth that it has. So I really don't know, lots of things. There are lots and lots of things. I had a professor who had a whole file of  advertisements for things in horticulture that were just somebody's idea. But they actually make no sense. products that come to market that people try to sell you. Now, it would be on the internet, probably. And it used to be in magazines. It they say it can do one thing really well. And maybe that's true, but there are other consequences in many cases.

Farmer Fred  27:24 
Sounds like vitamin b1.

Debbie Flower  27:27  
Exactly, exactly. Yes.

Farmer Fred  27:31 
We'll save that for another time. Yes, come planting time we'll bring up vitamin b1, and how you're better off just leaving them in those Flintstone tablets. Well, we learned something new that if you want to protect your plants, your tender plants from a frost or freeze especially your citrus and USDA zones nine, you're better off using a frost cloth. You're better off watering the soil thoroughly to help stave off the effects of a frost. You're better off stringing warm lights in there as well to stave off the effects of a frost

Debbie Flower  28:07 
right. add heat, trap heat, or mix the air in case you've got a  local friend with a helicopter they can fly over your house and mix the air.

Farmer Fred  28:16 
Well. Yeah, that's the other thing you could do is you could set up a big fan outside and blow it around your plant and that might help but I don't think so.

Debbie Flower  28:24 
No, you need to bring the air from above back down to the earth.

Farmer Fred  28:28 
Well, once again, we've learned a lot here on the Garden Basics podcast. Thank you Debbie Flower.

Debbie Flower  28:33 
My pleasure, Fred.

Farmer Fred  28:35  
The Garden Basics podcast is going to a winter schedule, maybe just like your favorite local nursery. November through January, Garden Basics will come out once a week on Fridays. Then, as the weather warms back up in February, we'll return to our twice a week schedule. Thank you for listening, subscribing, and leaving comments. We appreciate that you've included us in your garden life.